Tom Thumb

A worn out one might be a hay burner or a piece of junk.

Even affectionate names like Puffing Billy, Tom Thumb, Grasshopper, called attention to chuffing breath, small scale, odd motion, or mechanical awkwardness.

Those nicknames belong to a world in which speed still had smoke, pistons, jolts, and effort attached to it.

The streamline age would try to replace that barnyard and workshop vocabulary with the language of wind, silver, flight, and effortless motion.

Admiral Sir Tom Phillips commanded Force C.

Known as Tom Thumb for his diminutive stature, Phillips sparked quite a lot of controversy.

Critics labeled him a desk admiral.

Yet Field Marshal Smuts would call him an admirable choice.

In our childhood, says Reginald Scott, our mother's maids have so terrified us with an ogre devil having horns on his head, fire in his mouth, and a tail, eyes like a basin, fangs like a dog, claws like a bear, a skin like a Niger, and a voice roaring like a lion, whereby we start and are afraid when we hear one cry bow.

And they have so frayed us with bull beggars, spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, silens, Kit Whitickanstick, tritons, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, imps, calkers, conjurers, nymphs, changeling, incubus, Robin Goodfellow, the sporne, the mare, the man in the oak, the hell wane, the fire drape, the puckhole, Tom Thumb, Hobgoblin, Tom Tumbler, Boneless, and such other bugs that we are afraid of our own shadows.

Discovery of Richcraft, London, 1584, 4th tome, page 153.

And know you this, by the way, he says, that heretofore Robin Goodfellow and Hobgoblin were as terrible and also as credible to the people as hags and witches be now.

So for example, I love going to coffee shops.

I'm going to go to a coffee shop anyway, but I'm probably not going to sit at the Starbucks inside my neighborhood Tom Thumb, which is a grocery store where I live in Dallas.

I can take something I already enjoy doing and do it in an environment that overlaps the life that I'm building.

So I go to cafes inside of nice hotels.

And so I grabbed a hold of that list and I held it up to the Lord and I said, "Lord, your word says you fill my mouth with good things.

I receive this by faith in the name of Jesus." And I packed up my two babies and we went to the grocery store down the road that was called Tom Thumb, and I went in and I headed straight to the seafood counter.

And I was nervous 'cause I'm like, the voice that kept thinking is, "What if I missed it? What if I missed it? This is gonna really hurt my faith." And we were living off of faith at this moment.

Again, one income, young, not a lot of money, living in kind of a ghetto-y area that we ended up moving to 'cause he got switched up there and we didn't know the areas.

"I'll be careful."

And he climbed down from the window seat and clattered away over the red-tiled floor into the picture book room where he found Peter Rabbit, Tom Thumb, Aladdin, Robinson Crusoe, and other old friends waiting for the Christmas party to begin.

Nicholas had just taken out his little red leather book and was writing down the names of some books he had never seen before, Perez the Mouse, The Magic Fishbone, and The Short History of Discovery, when the brownie called out.

"I'm nearly starved.

said Anne Caraway.

"I was just dreaming a little, seeing the first circus I ever saw in a big tent in Portland, Maine.

I shook hands with General and Mrs. Tom Thumb, and I came out with lots of balloons.

I'll telephone Julian's mother right away."